


Honne

by ncfan



Series: Femslash February [23]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alien Cultural Differences, Bechdel Test Pass, Canonical Character Death, Children, Cultural Differences, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Big Bang, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Femslash February, Femslash February 2018, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, POV Female Character, Pre-Canon, Pre-teens - Freeform, Ryloth | Twi'lek, Rylothean Culture, Triggers, Twi'leks, War, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 09:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13784820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: In the two weeks since her mother had died, Hera hadn't spoken to Numa. Of course, she had barely spoken to anyone, which was only to be expected. Hera didn't speak with Numa for two weeks after her mother died, until one morning she came asking Numa for help.





	Honne

**Author's Note:**

> I was at a loss for what to title this, so I went with ‘honne’ after finding it on a list of words whose complex meanings make it difficult to translate them into English without losing at least _some_ of their meanings. ‘Honne’ is a Japanese word that describes the contrast between a person’s true thoughts and desires, that which is usually kept hidden except from whom they are closest with, and what it is socially acceptable for them to think and feel and exhibit in public. Seemed appropriate here.
> 
> [CN/TW: Imperialism, brief discussions of slavery and sex trafficking]

Funeral rites had been given a fortnight ago. Under normal circumstances, the doors to the funeral hall would have been closed and someone of Numa’s status would not have been allowed to attend. However, these were not normal circumstances. Normality was a dream years-dead on Ryloth. General Syndulla felt that it made little sense for funerals to be the closed affairs they had once been; when someone in their cell died, the entire cell saw them off to the nighthome. Given that some funerals would have been attended by only one or two otherwise, there was wisdom in this decision.

Funeral rites had been given a fortnight ago, and Hera had said not one word to Numa in that time. Truthfully, Numa was uncertain that Hera had spoken to anyone save her father and the old astromech that followed her everywhere she went. It wasn’t… Well, Numa wasn’t certain what the normal protocol _was_. When her parents had died, there had been no opportunity even for a funeral, let alone traditional mourning; the same was true when her uncle died a while later. And the mourning customs of the Syndulla were a world apart from what would have been normal in the village where Numa was born; she knew, at least, that there would be no breast-beating here, no scarification born of grief.

But it did not feel natural to Numa to do these things, either. She had left her village behind her, stepped out of the rubble and walked away, leaving footprints of pale ash behind her, what felt like a lifetime ago now. Her roots were not to be found in that place. Her roots were—

Numa did not think she had roots anywhere. She was bound to nothing. That was not so liberating as you might think.

Hera had neither spoken to nor approached Numa in the past fortnight, and Numa would not question it. Perhaps this was simply a mourning custom of the Syndulla. And it was hardly as though Hera’s absence meant that Numa sat idle. She had her duties, still had to run food and ammunition and medical supplies to the front lines when ordered, still had to perform weapons maintenance, still learned to mix chemicals for explosives at Danae’s side. General Syndulla wouldn’t let children her age fight on the front lines, but the day when she was old enough to prove herself would come soon enough; attending properly to combat training was a must.

A fortnight of radio silence, and then, one morning, as Numa was close to finishing up her chores, Hera walked across the courtyard towards her, her shadow undulating thin and black on the tiles, like a ribbon caught in the wind. There was the squeak of wheels on stone, and the old astromech emerged from the shadows on the other side of the courtyard and followed hurriedly after her. Numa had never known that droid to care for anyone else, but it followed after Hera like a tame tooka; she wondered briefly if she would ever understand it.

“Numa,” Hera said quietly upon stepping out of the sun, the shadows gathering round her like a blanket—something to protect a wandering girl, but Hera had always been so lucky that her mother swore the gods must favor her, so perhaps it wasn’t strange that shadows might favor her as well. “I…” She stopped, staring at the ground and frowning. “…We haven’t seen each other in a while. How are you?”

Numa set the blaster she had been cleaning aside, but did not stand. “I am well. I am… sorry, for your loss. May Irida Syndulla find her way safely to the nighthome. May it be a long time yet before you join her there.” Numa remembered the words to speak to the bereaved at least, the words she had been taught so long ago that she no longer remembered the teacher. They sat so heavy and awkward on her tongue that she felt like she was trying to balance a stone instead of words, but she remembered them still. And she knew that they should have been spoken sooner, far sooner than this, but there had been no _time_. No time, no opportunity.

Hera mouthed the word ‘nighthome’ silently, blinking rapidly. “Thank you, Numa. Do you have any free time today?”

Now, there was a request Numa hadn’t heard in a while, not since a good time before Irida Syndulla died. They were children, but they were hardly idle. “I have three more blasters to clean; then, I am free until noon.”

“Noon,” Hera murmured. “Alright. I was wondering if you could help me with something. I have to go through my mother’s belongings, to figure out what can be kept and what—“ She broke off, her eyes over-bright. Numa opened her mouth, concern pressing down on her tongue, but Hera composed herself before Numa could say anything. “—Needs to be sold.” Though composure sat on her shoulders with far less ease than shadows did. “Father asked me to see to it. Will you help me?” On the last few words, her voice wobbled, pitching high and low on every syllable.

“Of course,” Numa replied automatically. “I will be done with this—“ she gestured to the blasters, the mat the clean ones dried on, the jar of cleaning solution and her tools “—in perhaps fifteen minutes.”

Her nodded, and without another word sat down in the shade with her. Not flush against Numa, not as close as Numa would have liked. Not that she should have wished for closeness. Hera was in mourning, and closeness would have disrupted Numa’s work, both her concentration and her materials. Besides, Hera had come from inside, where it was cool. The morning was not so late, but already sweat dribbled down Numa’s forehead, dripped off the tips of her lekku to the ground. The heat would have only grown worse if they sat close together. (Numa still wished for closeness.)

The wind blew in the wind chimes that hung from hooks on the awning of the veranda, colored glass and shining metal and stone carved so fine that the hollow chimes glittered in the sun like translucent ice. The courtyard and the shaded walkways were filled with their music, soft and hollow and whispery. For Numa, it was easy to lose herself in her work and, inattentive of anything else, forget that it was the song of wind chimes she heard. Her mind drifted off into work, and when the wind blew and the chimes chimed, she was shaken abruptly from her work, for she could have sworn she heard voices. It was silly. She was too old to be thinking things like that. But sometimes, all the same, she would get caught up in the music of the wind chimes and imagine this to be what the voices of the dead sounded like.

“You could have come to the feast,” Hera said softly—not that it had been much of a feast, and they both knew it. “Nobody would have cared.”

Numa shrugged, her lekku pressing close to her back. “I did not think it appropriate.”

Hera’s lekku quivered noticeably, but her response was unequal to the outburst. “Oh.”

She raised her hands to fiddle with the pouch on her belt, a portable toolkit, unless she’d changed its purpose since Numa had last spent time with her. Her hands… All thoughts of cleaning the blasters fled Numa’s mind when she really got a good look at Hera’s hands. “Why are your hands black?” Numa demanded, her heart pounding, just a little bit. “What happened?”

Hera scrunched up her face, holding her right hand level with her chest. A sharp, pungent odor hooked Numa’s nose, more powerful than the cleaning solution Numa was using on the blasters. “What do you mean, ‘what happened’?” She stared at Numa very hard. “My mother just _died_ …”

Numa’s lekku pressed ever closer to her back. “Mourners wear that in your home province?”

“Yes,” Hera bit out, clenching her jaw.

“Oh,” Numa mumbled, looking away. “I… I did not realize.”

Hera shifted her weight, the fabric of her trousers rustling almost unbearably loudly. “It’s just cixa root,” she told her. “It washes right of if you have soap and warm water.”

“…Oh.”

The droid grumbled something, but Numa understood neither Binary nor its bizarre attempts at emulating Basic, so she ignored it.

At last, she was finished cleaning the blasters and putting them away in the room just off of the veranda where they belonged. “Come with me,” Hera said, and follow Numa did.

She winced when they stepped out into the courtyard. It was hot enough under the shade of the awning, but it was full summer and hot enough under sun that Numa sometimes wondered if her flesh would cook straight off her bones if she lingered too long. The wind posed a problem also. Currently, the cell had as their place of refuge an abandoned estate (Numa had never cared to ask what had become of the previous occupants) high up in the mountains where the Empire had yet to penetrate. The courtyard was blocked off from the outside world on all four sides, and the walls were quite high, but still the wind blew hot and dry and dusty, making Numa cough.

Stand outside for five minutes, and you’d be shaking dust out of your shoes all day. She’d been born in forest land. She had never understood how people who lived in the more arid regions could stand it.

But the courtyard was not a large one, and soon they were back inside the house where it was, mercifully, despite the lack of working electricity on most parts of the estate, than it was outside. (The lack of electricity was, unfortunately, a necessity. They were trying to _avoid_ detection, after all, and a high enough power emission would show up on long-range scanners.) They passed a few other members of their cell, Nikos taking supplies from one of the storerooms to the infirmary, and Xiùlán performing a routine sweep for Imperial listening devices (It behooved them to be cautious, always). A few more were spending their free time playing a card game in a doorway, each covetously eyeing a slowly-growing pile of ration bars.

(Why anyone would hold up ration bars as stakes, no matter how hungry they were, was beyond Numa. Most of them tasted like chalk, stale for so long that flavor had long since crumbled into dust.)

Hera led Numa down a long flight of stairs, towards what had been the former’s parents’ living quarters—now just her father’s. When the estate’s prior inhabitants had lived here, the masters of the house had lived upstairs; their private living quarters had been repurposed as a control center-cum-watch post, since its position overlooking a ravine almost a mile down made it an excellent vantage point from which to watch for Imperial movement. But these days, it did better for the rebels to sleep underground, both because it was cooler, and because of the network of tunnels that spread from the compound out into the mountains. If worst came to worst, better to be as close to the access point into the tunnels as possible.

They walked down the staircase in silence, the telltale metallic thuds behind them speaking to the droid’s awkward progress down the stairs. Whoever lived here must have been fabulously wealthy; the cellar was larger and partitioned off into more rooms than Numa had seen anywhere since the cell had moved out from the Syndulla clan estate to here. But at last they reached the cellar room where Hera’s parents had lived.

It was cooler this far down than it had been upstairs, as if summer had already fled the mountains; Numa’s skin was all raised in gooseflesh. Four ventilation shafts had been cut into the rough-hewn rock walls, and they lanced the air in gold, the grills casting intricate shadows. Otherwise, it was dark; Numa winced and tried in vain to blink away the glare when Hera lit a small lamp.

Harsh though the light might have been on her eyes, it gave Numa the opportunity to see the room more clearly. There was a low bed, barely large enough, she thought, for two adult Twi’leks to lie in together, pushed up against the wall, the blankets and pillows and brightly-colored red and orange afghan all askew on the thin mattress. There was the low dresser the lamp was sitting on, its surface deeply scratched and splintered; one leg came up short and was propped up with a brick. A battered old wicker chair sat in the far corner of the room, another afghan, this one striped black and green and yellow and white and heavily coated with reddish dust, tossed over its arms.

A breath of wind found its way down one of the ventilation shafts, whispering with a host of voices dry as sand at Numa’s ear. She flinched and tried not to pay them any heed; you weren’t supposed to listen to such voices.

Hera wasn’t concerned with the bed or the wind, though. She sat down by a large wicker chest at the foot of the bed, motioning for Numa to join her. “This is where my mother kept her things,” she explained, not meeting Numa’s gaze. “We might as well get started.”

The wicker chest was easily the finest thing in the room, at least that Numa could see. The wicker wasn’t broken in any places, and the gold and leather latch was intact. The lid of the chest was painted red (it looked dark, but that might just be the lighting; now that Numa’s eyes had adjusted to the lamp, the room had grown dim again) with white flowers gleaming dully in the light. Numa could only suppose it was something Irida Syndulla had taken with her from home when the cell moved here.

Hera fumbled at the latch, her blackened fingers trembling slightly. She just scrabbled at the latch, the trembling migrating to her shoulders, as if there was an earthquake only she could feel. Eventually, Numa guided her hands away (they felt oily, almost sticky; Numa wondered how Hera could stand having the juice from the cixa root on her hands if it felt like _that_ ) and undid the latch herself. Hera flashed her a watery smile, her eyes glimmering, and lifted the lid up.

Immediately, Numa was hit by a powerfully sweet odor, with an undertone of something hard and spicy; her head spun, and she found herself clutching for purchase on the rim of the wicker chest. “Mother keeps a sachet of dried herbs in here to keep her clothes from smelling like dust.” Hera stiffened. “Kept,” she corrected herself in a brittle voice, and dug her hands into the contents of the chest, which was lined with iridescent red silk that shimmered like can-cell wings. “Everything she took when we left home; it’s all here.”

“Hera… your hands…”

“What about them?” A spark of recognition flashed in her eyes. “Oh, you mean… The cixa root doesn’t get on anything, Numa; look.” She wiped the palm of her hand on the lining of the chest, only to bring her hand away with the lining still clean.

They set to work, neither especially eagerly. Numa supposed that Hera didn’t like the reminder that her mother was never coming back from her last errand to the frontlines. Herself, going through a dead woman’s belongings made Numa feel like a carrion bird, even if she had been _asked_ for her help. It was too soon yet to touch Irida Syndulla’s belongings; she was too freshly dead, and they were not yet cleansed. But normality was years-dead on Ryloth, and Numa couldn’t argue that the resistance needed all the credits they could get.

Numa took a small book from the top of the chest and ran her hand slowly over the cracked leather binding. “What is this?” she asked curiously, feeling at the spine and blinking in surprise when she came away with a small pen.

Faster than Numa could respond, Hera snatched the book from her hands. “This was my mother’s diary,” she explained, her lekku signing out a silent apology. “She liked to handwrite her thoughts. No one else needs to see this.”

Numa winced. “Agreed.”

And on they went, sorting through the deceased’s now-ownerless possessions. It was slow going; the chest was large enough for Numa to lie down in it, almost without having to bend her legs, and she was reasonably certain that no part of her would have shown from over the rim. There was also Hera pausing over everything she looked at, swallowing hard as though each breath of air she took came after someone had wrapped their hands around her throat and _squeezed_.

As they went on, half-rotted memories whispered to Numa in garbled voices, in scents and colors and tactile sensations whose genesis Numa could never reach, only guess at. Her parents had not been wealthy; few Twi’leks could claim to possess the kind of wealth enjoyed by the Syndulla (before the Empire came, or perhaps further back, to the Separatists), but Numa’s family had not been wealthy by anyone’s standards. They had not been abjectly poor, or at least, Numa didn’t think they had been; her memories before the Separatist occupation were not shadowed by hunger. But neither were they wealthy.

Her mother would not have had any clothes as fine as Irida Syndulla’s. Numa was startled by some of them—some of the clothes she saw were too fine to be worn out here, and she had never seen Hera’s mother wear them, anyways. But sometimes, she would see a particular color or pattern, and it would… jar her. There was a silken caftan, black with a pattern of outlined white hexagons, with gold dots in their centers. Numa blinked, her throat searing. She had seen this before, or she had seen something similar, somewhere. Where had she seen it? She strained to remember, but there was a wall in her memories that she could never surmount, and she knew not what lied behind it. Sometimes, Numa wanted the wall to break, but sometimes she was afraid that if it did, what it penned in would come flooding out all at once, and drown her.

They kept working, sorting things into piles of what could be kept and what needed to be sold. Silence traipsed down the stairs and sat with them, the guest neither welcome nor abhorred, the guest who could change its face to suit the mood, but was faceless today, unsure what to make of the two girls who sat beside it. Even the whirring of the droid’s motivators seemed muffled. Upstairs was more dream than reality.

Hera shifted progressively closer and closer to Numa with each passing minute, until she was pressed up against Numa’s side, her head dipping down to rest on Numa’s shoulder. The closeness was like slipping on a pair of by now well-worn shoes. Numa pressed easily into Hera’s side, saying nothing. When she felt one of Hera’s lekku drape across her shoulders, she did the same, albeit careful to avoid touching any part of Hera beside her shoulders. She just wanted…

Numa wasn’t sure what she wanted. Perhaps she just wanted to stay like this, and will the Empire away.

Alas, after only a couple of minutes, she realized that there was something that required her attention. Her cheek pressed against the top of Hera’s head, rubbing against the cool, almost slick material of her kerchief, she had a good view of the piles Hera had been making.

Well, ‘pile.’

“Hera…” Even before she spoke the words aloud, they sat bitter as dalma rind on Numa’s tongue, squirming and trying their best to slither back down her throat. But she opened her mouth so they could not stay, and said to her, “You plan to keep all of that?” It had to be a ‘keep’ pile; everything there was in the same place where Hera had set down her mother’s diary.

Hera didn’t meet her gaze. “Yes, I do.”

Reluctantly, Numa pulled away, and craned her head so that she was looking Hera in the eye. “Hera, you can’t keep all of it.” Smothering the part of herself that would have loved to carry more away from her ruined home than a worn-out old tooka doll, Numa went on, “Your father wanted you to find things you could _sell_ , didn’t he?”

“I… I know.” Hera grimaced and swallowed hard. “We need the credits, and—“

The droid broke in, its harsh, unlovely voice sending silence running out of the room and scurrying up the stairs.

Whatever it said, it prompted a startled, slightly croaking laugh from Hera’s mouth, nowhere near as sweet as it ought to have been. “Yes, Chopper, I know we could use the credits to buy you a new ambulatory strut. I don’t think Father would think of that as a good use of credits.”

The droid grumbled something and rapped on the mismatched strut in question with one of its manipulator arms.

Hera ignored the second interjection and turned her attention back to Numa; it tried to get her attention for a little while by rotating its head and furiously waving its arms, but gave up soon enough. “I…” Hera clutched at her mother’s old datolen, its billowing sleeves draped over her arm. “I know I’m supposed to set some of this aside to be sold. But I don’t…” She swallowed very hard. “…I feel like I’m getting rid of her, too.” Her hands shook, tears shining in her eyes. “I feel like I’m trying to sell my memories of her if I get rid of any of this. It feels like we’re acting like she was never here, and—“ Hera broke off, tears streaming silently down her face, her fingers crushing the fabric of the datolen in their grasp.

The part of Numa that wanted more of her original life than a worn-out old tooka doll was screaming inside her skull, pounding on bone with desperate hands. The part of her that was a member of the Free Ryloth movement was silent. She reached out tentatively and rubbed Hera’s trembling shoulder, words caught fast in her throat, burning there but never coming out.

“I don’t understand why Father couldn’t do this himself,” Hera muttered, scrubbing her face dry of tears, even as more threatened to fall.

It would be easy to say that General Syndulla didn’t have time to do something like this, but even Numa, who was hardly in his inner circle, suspected he could have found the time to go through his wife’s belongings if he had wished to. What Numa had observed was that, no matter what region they were from, it was usually the deceased’s female relatives who handled the mundane aspects of preparing for the funeral rites and… afterwards. But General Syndulla had taken care of preparations when it came to his wife’s funeral rites. Why he couldn’t have taken care of this, too, Numa didn’t know.

She didn’t know, but it was still the two of them doing this, in the end.

“I don’t think…” Numa hesitated, but her resolve grew stronger when Hera looked at her out of red, puffy eyes. “…I think you can keep the datolen. It was made for your clan alone, and I think outsiders would not appreciate it as we do.” Even though the fire-stone beads sewn on the datolen were worth a small fortune, Numa suspected any off-worlder would regard it as a “Twi’lek curiosity” or one of the many less polite terms she had heard used the last time an errand took her to one of the towns where there was a strong Imperial presence.

(She remembered the way an officer in Imperial gray had _stared_ at her as she walked by. No, what she was remembering was the way they had _all_ stared. Some had looked at her like she was a bug, something unwelcome and disgusting that had invaded their orderly world and reminded them that the galaxy outside of their narrow scope of what should be was not empty. Some had looked at her like they expected her to fire a blaster or throw a bomb at any moment. That, Numa supposed, made them smarter than the others, but still, she bristled at the idea that these men could come to her home to strip the planet bare and enslave all found alive on the surface, and yet look at _her_ like that.

The worst of them were the ones who stared at her with undisguised hunger in their eyes. They looked at her as though she was one of the slaves dancing in an Empire-controlled cantina, or sometimes simply looked at her as though she had no clothes on at all. Children never went into the towns unaccompanied, and the girls never went without one of the men chaperoning them. Sometimes the idea that she couldn’t run errands unsupervised chafed, but Numa was grateful for it whenever she encountered that particular kind of human man.)

“And Mother’s diary should stay here,” Hera said quietly. Her eyes were a little brighter now, bright with something other than tears, though her voice was just a touch raw.

Numa winced again. “I didn’t think selling it was a good idea. But what about the rest of the things in your pile?”

“They were _hers_ ,” Hera insisted, but her resistance crumbled as fast as she had tried putting it up. “And most of it would get us a lot of credits.” ‘A lot’ of credits didn’t quite do it justice. Most of what was in Hera’s pile was clothing and jewelry, all of it finer than anything any Twi’lek would see outside of the most rarefied circles. “Alright, let’s just…” Hera’s face contorted, muscle stretched taut over bone. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Numa would have liked to tell Hera that she wouldn’t think less of her for keeping all of it, but she couldn’t quite find the words.

They turned their attention back to the chest, which was now a little over halfway empty. Irida Syndulla, Numa thought wryly, must have been truly masterful at packing a large amount of objects into a (relatively) small space. How much the chest must have weighed when it was full, Numa could only imagine.

Hera pulled at a sheet of green silk, and gasped softly at what she found lying underneath. “What is it?” Numa asked, concerned. “Are there weevils?”

“No,” Hera said absently. She took the object she had gasped over out of the chest, holding it aloft in both hands. It was a figure of stone, with a segmented based and a pair of ‘shoulders’ and ‘arm’ that swung backwards and forwards when Hera picked it up. The stone had markings painted on it, some of which Numa recognized as the written form of the dialect of Ryl spoken in the Tann Province, though Numa couldn’t understand any of it. Tann Ryl was nearly its own language. “It’s my mother’s kalikori.” Hera’s voice sharpened. “I’m not selling this.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to!” Numa said incredulously, before frowning at the object in question. “ _That’s_ a kalikori? It doesn’t look a thing like one.”

Defensive grief vanished from Hera’s face, replaced by a dull glimmer of curiosity. “Well, what did the kalikori in Nabat look like?”

There was a memory that didn’t wish to be unlocked, but Numa ignored the resistance she met with—it was pointless now; it wouldn’t change a thing—and strained to recall. “They were… they were made from wood; immortal pine, I think—I remember the smell, like—“ like her mother’s warm hands, like her father’s smile “—like… home. And I remember how red the wood was, almost scarlet; it must have been immortal pine.” Numa stared down at the ground, at the beaded scarf laid out across her lap and the little glass astrolabe she had found buried nearly all the way down. “When a woman—or a girl, sometimes—inherited the family kalikori, she would write her favorite prayer on it.”

Hera tilted her head to one side, her lekku dangling a few inches off the ground. “Wouldn’t that take up a lot of space?”

“Not as much as you think. Where I was born, we had many prayers that were expressed in a single word. Some of them could be written with a single character.” What had her mother written on their kalikori when it came to her? What prayer had she painted there on the passing of her own mother? This, at least, Numa thought she should have been able to remember, but when she went looking in the recesses of her mind, there was nothing. She had been a little girl when the Separatists came, and had paid little attention to an heirloom she couldn’t play with.

“So where’s yours?”

Softly had the question been put forth, but it still jarred Numa as if it had been spoken with a voice of crashing cymbals. “Blown to splinters, I imagine.” She could feel Hera’s eyes skating over her face, but didn’t look into her eyes. “The Separatists didn’t want to leave us any places to hide.”

A blackened hand edged into Numa’s field of vision, lighting on her shoulder. “That’s awful,” Hera whispered. “I… I’m sorry, Numa.”

Numa shrugged. “It was a long time ago,” she said, and now it was her turn for her voice to be brittle. “I wasn’t… I wasn’t old enough for it to really be important to me.”

Hera’s eyes searched her face still; unwillingly, Numa turned her head minutely, enough to see Hera frowning at her. “And now?”

“I don’t have time for such things, now.” Numa called up a smile that would have fit better on a festival mask than on her face. “We… We really should finish up here. I only have until noon.”

Hera’s frown deepened, but she didn’t argue. She had her own problems, after all.

-0-0-0- 

In the past two weeks, Hera Syndulla had learned much of grief and the faces it wore. In its youngest form, it was like a sandstorm over the Jixuan Desert—roaring and torrential and suffering no distractions, no delays. It felt like bruising, it felt like bleeding, it was a little like what Hera imagined dying to feel like. Like the color was being leeched from the world and everything else she could have felt was strangled by the storm. Her father had told her not to weep too long, that Ryloth would not wait forever, but in the first few days when Hera could not conceive of doing anything but weeping, she had paid him no mind.

As the days wore on and grief grew older, the storm lingered, but it was an intermittent thing, something that crept up on Hera at odd moments, but had gone hunting after other victims and could not devote all its time to her. She moved through the world as though underwater—movement difficult, steps ponderous, noise distorted—but she could again do something besides weep. She could feel something other than searing sorrow.

There was something more to be said of grief. It showed Hera its faces—sandstorm and wandering hunter and the ghosts of suggestive scents and sounds and textures. It had also set her feet on a path she could not step off of. The further Hera walked away from grief, the closer she same to it, like a starship falling into a black hole’s immense gravity.

The further she walked from it, the closer she came. That made finding a steady place difficult.

 _“Afraid? No, my love; I am not afraid_ ,” her mother had said to her once many years ago, just before a flight. Her mother had been a test pilot once, testing experimental starships and fighters for a company whose name Hera had long ago forgotten. Before the Empire came, before the Separatists came. _“If I was afraid of dying, I wouldn’t have come here!_ ” She had smiled, and leaned down to kiss the top of Hera’s head. _“Advances in space travel are difficult to make, Hera. Oftentimes, they’re dangerous. But we can’t let that stop us. It’s worth the risk to find new ways of doing things. It’s worth the risk to make progress. Now, go sit with your father. I have to start the test flight.”_

If she was afraid of dying, she wouldn’t have come here. Neither would Hera have come here, if she was afraid of dying. What she was afraid of was losing—

Later, much, much later, her father told her that they must all make sacrifices to free Ryloth. That they would all lose things, lose people, that grieving was natural but that they must not lose sight of that, too. Hera understood that, though she understood less why he would not sit down and grieve _with_ her, and instead seemed to have time for little else but his work. His asking her to go through her mother’s things was the first time he’d spoken to her in nearly a week, and then he couldn’t be bothered to go through them _with_ her.

Chopper had been there with her. Numa had as well, agreeing to help her in this, and had stayed until the chest was emptied of anything that needed to be sold, despite her obvious discomfort. It was better than being alone, and Numa hadn’t tried to draw more from her than she was comfortable giving. But now that task was done, and Hera was at loose ends again—her father was too busy working to speak to her, and no one else presumed to give her chores to do.

 _‘Hera, let’s go to the garage,’_ Chopper whined, tugging fruitlessly on one of her trouser legs.

“We don’t have any reason to go there,” Hera replied, as she beat a familiar path down one of the hallways on the first floor below ground level. “And I’ve got something else I want to do right now.”

She would have to find something useful to occupy her time soon. Her father spoke the truth—Ryloth would not wait for her while she wept, even if there was a part of her that wished it would. There was always work to be done; she would find work easily enough.

But for now…

Many of Hera’s past chores and errands had taken her to the quartermaster’s office. It was always neatly organized, even if many of the shelves were only sparsely populated or empty. Aola took obvious pride in her work, if the ire with which she responded to anyone messing up her shelves was any indication.

What could be found in the quartermaster’s office? Oh, an assortment of things, a little bit of everything. Spare clothing and boots (the clothes dusty and careworn, the boots scuffed, but still, they were there), and an assortment of pills for pain and fever, to be delivered to the infirmary as needed (No bacta—they’d had no bacta since an attack on the cell while they were moving to their new base had damaged their only tank). The mess had control over what food the cell ate while they were stationed in the base, but for those who were going to be out in the field for more than a few hours, the quartermaster was who they went to. Sometimes there would be a little bit of dried and salted meat, or pickled fruit in jars, but more often there were ration bars, or protein paste (which admittedly was just a touch vile; it was like eating clay), or gleb rations (which was even worse than protein paste), or veg meat. Sometimes you could find energy pudding, but not often.

Beyond that, there were spare energy packs for the blasters, the finished explosives Numa and Danae made down on the eastern end of the compound. There were candles, matches, and sometimes, sometimes there was wood for firing.

When Hera stepped into the quartermaster’s office, she found Aola fetching something for one of the guards—a pair of goggles to keep the dust out of their eyes; from what Hera overheard, they had dropped their last pair and broken them on the rocks. After the guard had left, she made her way to Aola’s desk, Chopper grumbling behind her the whole way. ‘ _This boring place? Really????’_

“Hello, Aola.” Hera didn’t smile, didn’t really have it in her to smile, but somehow, she didn’t think Aola would really mind.

Aola’s well-worn golden face did break into a smile, albeit a subdued one. “Hera. What can I do for you?”

Hera narrowed her eyes. “You have wood sometimes, don’t you?”

“That I do.”

“Do you have any immortal pine?”

Aola’s penciled eyebrows shot up. “I’ve _never_ had immortal pine in this office, Hera.”

Hera’s heart sank like a stone. Trying her best to keep it from showing no her face, she asked, “Why not?”

Aola shrugged, leaning back against the wall. “That tree doesn’t grow anywhere outside of the Jenall Province. I’m not expert, but there’s something about the soil that makes it just right for the immortal pine trees to grow there, but not anywhere else.” Her face hardened. “’Course, I don’t think there are a whole lot of those trees left at all, anymore. The Imp officers like to use the wood for their furniture. Immortal pines… they live a _long_ time, and the dead wood petrifies, but they don’t put out seeds very often. Not that the Imps care.”

Hera blinked hard and turned away, her jaw set. “No, they don’t.” They didn’t care anything for Ryloth, beyond what they could pillage and take away with them.

 _‘That was pointless,’_ Chopper muttered as they left. _‘Can we go to the garage now?’_

“No, Chopper; we’re not going to the garage.”

 _‘What was the point of that?!’_ he demanded. ‘ _Why were you asking her about wood?!’_

“You’ll find out, Chop,” Hera said absently. _If I can ever find any_.

It was maybe twenty minutes before Hera realized that she had been wandering around the compound with no destination in mind, that she had been wandering blindly, seeing no doors, seeing no people. She stopped, pressing her hand against the wall; whether to feel the coolness seep into her flesh or to keep her upright, she wasn’t sure. Of course, the stone didn’t feel right; nothing felt right through the juice of the cixa root on her hand.

 _Just two more weeks,_ Hera thought to herself, drawing a deep breath. _Two more weeks and I can stop applying it._

She felt as though her clothes had all been weighted down with stones; her shoulders sagged. Hera’s throat burned and burned until it closed up and Hera had to swallow to open it up again. It was just a little hard to breathe.

 _What is it this time_? she wondered dully, barely remembering to nod to a Twi’lek who passed her in the shaded hall. Maybe it was reminding herself of the cixa root on her hand, why it was there, or maybe it had had no genesis at all. Hera wished briefly that her father was here, that she was still small enough that he would fold her in his arms and comfort her when she was close to tears. But she wasn’t that small child anymore, and Ryloth wasn’t going to wait for her to quit weeping. Besides, she had something she could do now, something small, but not meaningless, she thought. If grief was to be her silent companion while she went about her business, so be it.

-0-0-0-

A pillar of flame bit into the darkness, lavender smoke flaring out around it. Even with a mask covering her mouth and nose, Numa gave a hacking cough as the smoke snuck down her throat. “It’s not… It’s not poisonous, is it?” she struggled to get out, her eyes watering.

Danae smiled, her gray eyes shining like stars on a winter night. “No more so than normal smoke, Numa. Pull your mask closer if it’s giving you trouble; we still have work to do.”

One of the most important of Numa’s daily chores… well, it wasn’t a chore. A chore implied boredom, and this, whatever else it might be, was _not_ boring. This lesson was one of the most, if not the most important, of her daily tasks. Numa helped Danae mix ingredients for explosives to be used by resistance members in the field, but it wasn’t just a matter of following Danae’s instructions mindlessly to make bombs and accelerants. She was _learning_ here, learning what went in to certain recipes, what was needed for a more or less powerful bomb, where to find natural ingredients, what cities she might find the right chemicals in, and more still than that.

Nothing was ever certain. The future often reached into the present to rend it to pieces, and whenever it did so, death was sure to follow. If Danae was to die, there needed to be someone who could replace her. That was Numa’s job, and she prayed that that awful responsibility would not come to her for years yet.

Fortune needed to smile on her more than it had lately for that to be true, but Numa would still pray, regardless. One of her villages’ gods might still hear her prayers, however far she might be from home.

Danae watched her with a knowing smile and turned her attention to another concoction. She lifted a vial of the last ingredient and poured it into the pot with a practice hand, letting it drip, drip, drip down slowly.

Blue sparks so bright they hurt Numa’s eyes flew up from the pot, crackling for near to a minute before they died down, through the chemical soup Danae had created still glowed dully in the darkness, a light source only slightly less reliable than the lamp they worked by at night. Numa stared at it wonderingly, wishing it was safe for her to dip her hand into the pot, let the liquid coat her fingers, and hold it close to her eyes so she could get a better look.

“You like this, don’t you?” Danae asked her, a warm glimmer in her eyes. “All those pretty colors, all the light some of the formulas give off when they’re completed?”

“I—“ Numa hesitated, worrying at her lip. Would admitting that she did like those things make her sound like a child? Would it make Danae think she wasn’t ready for the challenges that waited for her out in the field? That she wasn’t ready to be a warrior? “—Well, I like making supplies for our warriors to take with them on missions.”

“And you like the colors,” Danae said gently. She pressed her hand to Numa’s shoulder. “There’s no shame in it, you know. I like them myself. It’s good to take pride in your work and _enjoy_ it, Numa.”

Numa nodded silently, letting out a breath.

Danae’s smile evaporated as she smacked the small lamp near their work station with her open palm. Despite her “ministration”, it remained but dimly lit, casting a dim glow that barely illuminated their table. “Come on, Numa; back to work. There’s not much more we can do, tonight. _This_ thing doesn’t give us too much light, and I wouldn’t dare attempt some of the more complicated formulas without proper light; what some of them will do if you get just one thing wrong…” She shuddered. “There’s a reason I’ve always insisted you follow my instructions exactly, Numa. But we can’t get any more light up here than there already is, not without risking exposure.”

Numa nodded again, this time grimacing. She didn’t need to be told why they did their work on the highest level of the house, in a large room where the windows were both plentiful and, for as long as they worked, always left open. Numa did not wish to die, and she _especially_ did not wish to die by suffocation, or by inhaling poisonous fumes. “How much more do we need to do tonight?”

“Not much. Why, are you tired?”

“No,” Numa said quickly.

Danae laughed, her deep laugh booming on the ceiling. “Well, _I’m_ tired. I’m very much looking forward to leaving this room and going to bed.”

They went back to work, mixing up bombs for the cell to use. As of yet, Numa was only allowed to mix the simplest of recipes; Danae wouldn’t let Numa mix up anything more complicated, especially not after dark. Few people came to this part of the estate when Danae and Numa were at work; if the something went wrong in the room where the bomb-makers worked, it would be better not to be anywhere nearby. So when Numa caught sight of movement out of the corner of her eye, she took notice.

There was someone standing silent in the lightless doorway, watching them as they worked. Numa peered into the shadows, struggling to overcome the night-blindness that even the dim lamp she worked by had inflicted on her. Then, she heard a distinctly familiar metallic-sounding grumbling.

Hera?

Numa turned her attention back to the chemical ingredients arrayed before her. Whatever it was Hera was doing here, if she wasn’t going to come over to her workstation to talk to her (which was probably for the best, as Hera likely didn’t have a mask), then Numa wouldn’t find anything out until she was done. But still, she could feel Hera looking at her; her keen eyes pored over her face. Numa was struck by the sudden desire to give her work some sort of flourish, but instead found she had to read over the instructions twice in a row just to remember what order and amount to input; it was always difficult to concentrate when Hera looked at her like that.

As the very last bit of light bled to nothingness on the mountains on the western horizon, Danae sighed gustily and said their work was done for the day. “Go on ahead, Numa; I still have to clean this place up, and you need your rest.”

At any other time, Numa might have protested, might have insisted on helping her clean up, if only to prove that she could handle the same kind of workload as Danae herself. At any other time, there wouldn’t have been someone waiting at the door for her. Numa scurried off into the darkened hallway, where Hera waited.

“What’s happening?” she asked in a hushed voice, laying her hand on Hera’s forearm.

It was too dark to tell for certain, but Numa thought she saw Hera raise her eyebrows. “Nothing’s happening, Numa. Nothing more than usual.”

The droid muttered something that, given its temperament, was likely a complaint.

“Oh.” Numa’s stomach fluttered uncomfortably, swooping like a bird in flight. “What… what brings you here, then?”

Hera shuffled her weight from foot to foot. “I was wondering if you’d like to go out to the courtyard with me and look at the stars. The sky is very clear tonight.”

Stargazing was a favored activity of old of Hera’s; she had loved to climb to one of the highest floors on her family’s estate to get a clear, unobstructed view of the stars. Even when her parents begged her to stay closer to ground level in the event of an attack, as Numa recalled. “Your father told us not to go outside at night,” Numa pointed out cautiously. “We could be spotted by an Imperial probe.”

A sharp sigh tore jaggedly from Hera’s mouth. “Nobody’s sighted an Imperial probe droid in _weeks_ , Numa. Besides, I don’t think my father is going to notice us missing if we step outside for a while.” Her voice curdled in her throat as she went on, “He has more important things to worry about, after all.” She took Numa’s hands in her own; oily and sticky as they were, they were still warm and, if not soft, then gentle. “Please, Numa?”

Even if Numa had to struggle to make the rest of her out, Hera’s eyes were clearly visible in the dark. They were just as vivid as they had ever been, as green as the new shoots of grass that poked their heads out of the dirt in spring. It was likely trite to say so, but Hera’s eyes had always reminded Numa of nothing quite so much as springtime, when even the banks of a wadi might bloom for a short time, if there was enough rain.

…And thinking about it, that was definitely trite to think, let alone say. Numa imagined saying it to Hera, and was grateful the darkness hid her blush. More than reminding her of springtime, though, what those eyes were right now was pleading. Very pleading.

 _This is not how it’s supposed to work,_ Numa thought wryly to herself, _it truly isn’t_. Numa was the younger of the two of them, if only by a little. By all rights, it ought to have been her who begged and pleaded with Hera to convince her to do what she wanted, not the other way around.

But though the idea of potentially getting in trouble was a daunting one, the proposal of spending time with Hera away from the others was not.

“Alright,” Numa conceded, smiling a little. “Let’s go look at the stars, since you love them so.”

As she followed Hera and the droid back downstairs, Numa stared at the back of Hera’s head, her smile cooling into a frown. Hera’s eyes had been clear, no trace of redness in them. Her voice had been smooth and even, without any of the sandpaper-roughness that would have signaled that she’d been crying recently.

“How are you?” Numa asked to the back of Hera’s head, wishing that the shadows wouldn’t crowd around them so.

Numa could just make out Hera’s shrug. “I’m okay.” After a long pause, Hera looked behind her, just enough so that Numa caught sight of one of her eyes gleaming in the dark. “Didn’t you just ask me that this morning?”

Numa matched Hera’s shrug with one of her own. “It doesn’t hurt to ask.”

“I’m _fine_ , Numa,” Hera insisted, but somehow, Numa doubted that her voice was as firm as she would have liked.

They came upon the courtyard where Numa had spent much of that morning cleaning blasters, but Hera did not stop there. Instead while all the while Numa looked at her curiously, Hera led her through the main part of the house, past the room where the children slept, past the large, formerly empty room (Hera had once told Numa that its original purpose was to serve as a dance floor) that had been claimed as a dining hall for the cell. Hera stepped out into the main courtyard, turned to Numa and smiled, her face illuminated by the light of Ryloth’s largest moon, so that it glowed as if lit by some internal light. “This spot is better for stargazing, don’t you think?”

Numa surveyed the courtyard, which dripped moonlight and shadow in equal measure, her brow deeply furrowed. “I suppose so…”

There were no lamps lit in the courtyard, even if it was heavily-trafficked during the day; General Syndulla hadn’t been joking when he said he wanted to minimize their risk of exposure as much as possible. But Numa had seen it in daylight often enough, and though moonlight and shadow might soften it, it did not soften it enough to make it a pretty sight.

In the center of the courtyard, surrounded by cracked and faded tiles, there was a fountain. The basin was circular in shape, with a deep fissure wide enough for Numa to slip her hand inside without any fear of cutting open her skin on the jagged rock. That the basin was cracked so was of no consequence, because water hadn’t flowed out of the spout in Numa couldn’t begin to guess how long, maybe years. The fountain was dry as a bone, and stone that must once have been shining white was streaked with brown dust, the plaster cracked and peeling.

There were planters positioned just outside the shelter of the awning that were now graves for dead bushes, the shadows of their desiccated branches sending out spindly, grasping fingers. There was a pile of nut shells on the ground at the far corner of the courtyard from where they stood; the darkness added phantom shells to the pile, until the pile grew nearly as tall as Numa herself. Parched, scraggly grass grew up between the broken tiles.

But the sky was very clear.

Numa and Hera sat down together, curling up against the empty basin of the dusty fountain. It was warm still at night, but not so hot that Numa could entertain fears of her flesh cooking off of her bones. Instead, the dry warmth was welcoming, like slipping a lightweight blanket over your shoulders.

Somewhere in the soaring peaks, a bird was crying out in a high, shrill voice. If Numa let herself forget that it was a bird’s voice, then it burst back in on her unawares, creeping into her skull like the voice of the dead. Numa shivered and drew closer to Hera’s side, as if she could make Hera’s certainty, her deafness to the dead bleed into her and become a part of herself.

The stars glittered coldly overhead, blind to the suffering of the people alive on the surface of Ryloth. They were pretty, especially when Numa looked at them from so high up as she was now, where the air was clear and thin, and there were no clouds or pollution to obscure the stars from her eyes. They were pretty things, glittering like little shards of ice, but Numa did not love them. There was little love in her heart for things so utterly out of reach. Numa’s love was reserved for what was within her power to reach out and touch, to hold close to her, even as the long night closed in around her.

She turned her head and looked at Hera’s face.

Hera was as enraptured by the stars as she had ever been. A small, faraway smile (smaller than Numa had seen it in the past, though given the circumstances, she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised) had appeared on her mouth, while her eyes darted from star to star. She was mouthing something silently; Numa wasn’t certain, but she thought it might have been the names of the stars. If anyone here was likely to know the names of all the stars, it was Hera.

For all that Hera was sitting right next to her, for all that her body was warm next to Numa’s, all of a sudden Numa felt as though she was completely alone.

“Hera?”

No response.

Her heart sinking, Numa jostled Hera’s shoulder. “Hera?”

At last, Hera tore her gaze away from the sky. “Oh,” she said absently, before her face sharpened and she seemed to remember where she was. “Sorry, Numa. I just got—“  she broke off, though the words she’d left unspoken still churned in the empty air between their mouths.

“Distracted,” Numa supplied quietly, and it was a struggle to keep looking into her eyes.

“Distracted,” Hera agreed, offering up a smile by way of an apology; it was too dark to use lekku for that. “Numa…” That smile faded from her face like dew evaporating under the summer sun. “I wanted to talk with you about something.”

Numa blinked. Would it be uncharitable to say that she hadn’t expected this? After all, Hera’s mother had died just a fortnight prior, and from what Numa had seen, Hera hadn’t spoken a great deal to anyone in that time. Besides which, Numa looked at Hera’s face, clearly very serious in spite of the poor light, and felt foreboding sink on top of her like a second skin, one just a little too tight for comfort.

“Go ahead,” she said anyways.

Hera hesitated, which made foreboding tighten around Numa like a straitjacket, pinning her arms to her sides, pinning her to the ground. “Numa… about this morning…” Hera’s lekku pulled close to her body, pressed as close against her as possible. If anything, this only made Numa warier; it had been a long time since she had last seen Hera perform that kind of gesture. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry I pried about your kalikori. I know how personal that is; you shouldn’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

Numa looked away. Foreboding had left her, but now there was something else, something that was pricking her skin with unseen needles and making a noise like someone raking their fingernails against a chalkboard, a noise that grated on her very bones. “I… You don’t need to apologize, Hera. Really. I don’t mind talking about it… …It… hasn’t mattered to me in a long time.”

It does matter!” Hera insisted hotly. Numa’s eyes snapped onto her face; even the moonlight, as wont as it was to wash everything out to black and white, couldn’t hide the hot, angry color that had flooded her cheeks. “That was your… your family history, and now it’s _gone_.” Her face contorted, jaw working. “They took it from you, destroyed it like it was _trash_ , like it didn’t mean anything at _all._ ”

“I was a little girl.” Numa hunched her shoulders. “It didn’t mean anything to me back then.” Her family legacy hadn’t been anything she took for granted. That her home would always stay standing and her parents would always be there to protect her, those were things Numa had taken for granted. The kalikori was just that thing you sat out at family dinners during holidays; she was vaguely aware that it was supposed to stand in for all her dead relatives who had contributed to its current state, but nothing more than that. She simply never thought about her family legacy at all. Not once.

“And now?” There was an edge as keen as a vibroblades in Hera’s voice. “Does it matter to you now?”

“There’s no one left but me,” Numa said, very quietly. “It doesn’t matter if I care about it or not, when there’s no one left but me.”

All memory of her family would be swallowed up when she was dead. This would have been true even if her kalikori had survived the Separatist occupation; when a family line was determined to have completely died out, the kalikori was buried (or burned, depending on the custom) alongside its last keeper. A kalikori’s importance was a matter of _family_ history, after all. Outside of the family themselves, a kalikori was generally of interest only to anthropologists—and given how uncommon it was for kalikori to be out in the presence of off-worlders, Numa doubted that too many anthropologists had ever been permitted to study one.

When she died, her family would be consigned to oblivion. There would be nothing concrete of hers left for the following generations. Her memory would live on for a little while, but when those who knew her died, Numa would fall into nothingness as well. She knew how this went. Of all the tales told and songs sung, there would be none who spoke of her. Even when she was a warrior, Numa wouldn’t be the kind of warrior whose name was immortalized in the tales of their people. Their tales were for Twi’leks greater than her, the ones who could make a difference on their own as well as a leader. No, she would die, be forgotten, and be consigned to oblivion. There was nothing to root Numa down, after all.

Hera looked vaguely sick. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

“Don’t be.” Numa looked away. It was supposed to be her comforting Hera, not Hera trying to comfort Numa. Hera had just lost her mother, after all.

“I can’t imagine losing my kalikori,” Hera admitted. She looked a little as though she might cry now, rather than be sick. “It would be like if someone cut off one of my lekku. I don’t know how I’d go on.”

Numa raised an eyebrow. “I’ve heard that Twi’leks who live outside the Ryloth system don’t keep kalikori.”

Hera shuddered. “Well, Mother always says—“ she stopped herself, sucked in a deep, shuddering breath, and went on, very deliberately “—Mother always said off-worlders have no sense of family. I guess that applies to Twi’leks just as much as it does to aliens.” Not to be distracted, she fixed her attention back on Numa’s face. “But you don’t… you really don’t…”

She trailed off, and for the life of her, Numa couldn’t begin to guess what she would have said. “I…” Numa found herself rifling through her own mind for anything she could say that would ease Hera’s mind. “…I have Ryloth, still. I have you. I have Danae. I…” She paused and frowned at Hera. “Did you ever meet any Clone troopers during the war?”

Hera’s mouth twisted in a bitter line. “No. My parents kept me as far from the front lines as they could—even if we still had to go underground when the Separatists started dropping bombs.”

“I met some. I met two, briefly.” Pain lanced through her chest like a dull knife. She remembered. It felt like so long ago, but she remembered them both. “Briefly, but the meeting… changed me. One of them was killed on Umbara. The other… I don’t know. He could still be alive somewhere. I have my memories of them.”

Suddenly, Numa was aware of Hera’s droid looking at her. Though she’d never before gotten any sense of it having a particularly focused stare, now she felt as though it was staring very hard at her, as though it was trying to pry into her closed mind. Then, its head swiveled around so that it was looking up at the stars, and it said something that Numa could _almost_ make out if she listened hard, but not quite. Even when she could catch the suggestion of Basic coming from its vocabulator, it still sounded like nothing quite so much as senseless babbling.

But it went on for a while, at one point getting out one of its manipulator arms to wave around, and by the end of its rant, Numa was staring at it, her brow furrowed. “What did the droid just say?” she asked, tilting her head to one side.

Hera smiled ruefully. “He said he thought we were stargazing. Then he told me what star was the star for the planet where he assembled, and told me if I ever left Ryloth we should go there first and firebomb the factory from above.”

The droid… was a violent little thing, as Numa recalled. On an occasion when the entire cell had been attacked and Numa and the droid had both been present, she had had the… _singular_ experience of watching it wheel around electrocuting every stormtrooper it could get to with its spark projector. It was a dedicated rebel, she’d give it that.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere until Ryloth is free,” Numa murmured, though she wasn’t sure if she was saying it more to the droid or to Hera. “So you’ll have to wait a while to do that.”

Hera stiffened, her mouth hanging open. What she would have said, Numa never found out. They were interrupted before either of them could speak.

“Hera!” General Syndulla’s voice rang out across the courtyard, hard and tight with displeasure. “Hera, I told you not to go outside after dark. You could—“

“—Give our position away, you told me,” Hera fired back. She stiffened further, her hands moving jerkily to the toolkit on her belt. “Father, if the Empire can’t figure out where we are based on the power we’re drawing for electricity in the control room, they’re not going to figure out where we are if I sit outside at night.”

General Syndulla stepped out from under the awning and into the courtyard; at the same time, Hera sprang to her feet, and only the sharp breath Numa heard her take signaled anything less than equanimity as she did so. They had eyes only for each other; Numa and the droid might as well have been invisible. The air had abruptly become unpleasantly charged, and Numa wasn’t certain General Syndulla had even noticed her, let alone wanted to scold her as well, so she got up and left before an argument could really get underway. Strains of snapping voices greeted her ears as she headed back inside, but Numa closed her ears against them as best she could.

The room where the children in the cell lived was quiet and empty. It wasn’t especially large—it was smaller than the dining hall, anyways. General Syndulla didn’t hold with the idea that children should fight on the front lines as adults did; there were only eleven children here, and most of them were resistance fighters’ children who, for whatever reason, could not be sent elsewhere. Many of them enjoyed playing hide-and-seek once night had fallen, explaining the room’s emptiness; even if Numa was too old for such games, she still caught herself wishing sometimes that she could join them.

On this occasion, the emptiness of the room was welcome to her. Numa didn’t want an audience when she resurrected old ghosts.

There was a ghost confined to a large box under her bed. Rarely did Numa ever give it license to wreak havoc on her mind and her heart; she could afford to let nothing have such power over her. The ghost could not easily trouble her, anyways; it was bound to the confines of the box, and could not leave unless she permitted it to. You might think this would give Numa some comfort, but giving her that small level of power over one of her dead was precious little comfort. Every time it came out to haunt her, it was because she had let it out, rather than being due to circumstances beyond her control.

She had been a little girl when the Separatists came to Ryloth and the Republic came tearing after them, but Numa remembered it all. She remembered the bombs falling, her parents dying. She remembered hiding as the droids came and rounded everyone up, everyone but her, one child left to face an empty town alone, while the beasts normally confined to the wilds of Ryloth made Nabat their hunting grounds.

The underground had been her bed, any stony hole where the gutkurr couldn’t reach her had been her shelter. She had broken into people’s empty houses to eat what food she could find there, and when those short stores of unlocked doors and unlocked pantries wore out, she had resorted to digging through the trash to find anything that approached edible.

There wasn’t much. Her stomach grew hard and hot with hunger, and stole from the rest of her body to feed itself. So it was the most natural thing in the world that Numa’s friendship with her two rescuers began when they offered her the first fresh food she had eaten in over a week.

At the end of the war, the clones had betrayed and murdered the Jedi, smoothing the way for the rise of the Empire. Numa had never been able to make sense of that betrayal. Waxer had died long before war’s end ( _before he could return to Ryloth, to her_ ), but Boil? From what Numa had seen, Boil had been unimpeachably loyal to his Jedi, General Kenobi; she could search for eternity and never come up with a plausible reason for why he would have betrayed him.

_“And this clone…” The officer was laughing, an ugly smile on his hard, keen face._

_A spark of fury kindled in Numa’s chest. She took a step forward, but Gobi caught her shoulder and signaled ‘no’ with his tchun. A good thing, honestly. Numa didn’t know what she would have done to the officer if she had reached him, but she would surely have broken her cover._

_“This clone…” The officer chortled, laughing so hard that tears sprang to his eyes. “…He kept saying that voices made him do it, can you believe it? He kept saying there were these voices in his head telling him to kill the Jedi. It was the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”_

Crazy to the mind of an Imperial officer, but to Numa, it was one of the last lights of hope in her heart. The clones couldn’t have betrayed the Jedi willingly. They must have been forced to do it, somehow. And if it meant believing that they had come under some strange compulsion, Numa would believe it, even if it meant being asked to believe in magic again as a small child would. The clones would not have paved the way for the Empire to come to Ryloth. Boil would not have done it to her.

Numa lifted the lid of the box and breathed in the past.

How Waxer’s unit had known to find her once she and her uncle moved away from ruined Nabat, Numa would never know. She had only an empty suit of armor, one of the few things a clone could claim as their own, to remind her that she had ever been a little girl who was saved by two clone troopers. It was old now, and weather-beaten and scratched, but strong still. The armor would endure long after Numa died and was consigned to oblivion.

“Thank you for my life, my brothers,” she said quietly, the past sitting on her shoulders like a yoke. “It’s not much of a life, but it’s mine. I still see the sun every morning. ……Thank you for that.”

A familiar harsh, metallic vocalization off to her right made Numa look up. Hera’s droid hovered in the doorway. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the droid looked almost uncertain—as much as a droid could ever look uncertain, anyways. It wheeled slowly towards her, making those same sounds she was used to from it, but much, much quieter. When it reached her and saw what was in the box, it fell completely silent, its photoreceptor slightly downcast.

“I wish I could understand what you’re saying,” Numa said, her mouth forming a half-hearted smile. “You served with the clones, didn’t you?”

Silence.

Her hands began to shake a little as she reached for the helmet. She didn’t want to see, didn’t want to see, but her hands were working practically of their own accord. The mind wished for one thing; the body, another.

When she had first received this armor, Numa had imagined wearing it when she was older. She hadn’t realized that most of it just wouldn’t fit her, no matter how old she was; the idea of remembrance was more important to her, and she knew of no better way to remember Waxer than this.

But it just wasn’t… Hardly any of it would fit properly once Numa was grown. The helmet… She had tried the helmet on once she was willing to touch any of it, and it had been far too big. Too big, too heavy, it made her head loll to one side as though her neck was made of straw. Older, Numa knew that there was another problem: when she reached her full height, the helmet might well fit the rest of her head properly, but it would certainly be too small for her lekku. It might be too small for them already; she wasn’t sure, hadn’t tried it on in years.

There was something else, also.

Numa turned the helmet so that its side faced her. She needn’t have, _shouldn’t_ have, really; she knew what she would find there, knew the paint had not peeled or faded. It was the only thing that let her know that she had meant as much to them as they had to her, no matter how short a time they had known each other. It was the material proof of their association, the substantiation of her memories. A clone trooper’s armor was one of the few things he could call his own, and one of the few things that he could use to mark himself as an individual. To the untrained eye, they had just been a sea of faces, a sea of copies with no identity of their own. But they had been more than that, and had always strived to prove it. Their armor was a marker of the people they were, the individuals they were.

When Numa looked at the side of Waxer’s helmet, she saw her own face, years younger, staring back at her.

“You… you served with the clones, didn’t you?” The words clawed their way out of Numa’s throat, past gates of teeth, ripping up whatever sensitive flesh they came into contact with. “Do you still think of them?” Her vision blurred. “Do you think the survivors still remember you?”

The silence she was answered with reared up and swallowed her whole.

-0-0-0-

Hera had honestly thought her father wouldn’t notice if she stepped out of the interior of the estate and under the open sky. Besides the fact that he hardly seemed to remember that she existed half of the time, it was a big house. Nothing on the size of her home, but still, a big house, one that was easy to get lost in, easy to lose track of someone in. If you look for someone and they’re not where you expected them to be, it wasn’t like you would just _know_ where they had gone. You could not know; you could only guess, and search.

It had felt like an eternity since Hera had last seen the stars. Trapped earthbound, wandering through the lightless corridors of an abandoned house was like being back in the funeral hall all over again—you search for a way out and never find one, look for a light and never see so much as a pinprick, your lungs scream for clean air but your mouth is full of earth, your voice silenced by caverns that lead forever nowhere. Leave, or wander forever as a shadow, dropping bitter tears on the earthen floor. The difference was that two weeks ago, Hera had wanted nothing more than to stay in the funeral hall, even if it meant trading flesh and blood in for smoke and shadow that could be banished with light or drowned in darkness. Now, she felt the pull again, the pull towards the sky, and answering it was so much easier than it used to be.

The sky was calling for her in a voice that spoke a language she could not understand. She understood none of it, but still she found herself struck with a longing she couldn’t explain, something that was with her always.

A pity her father had never felt the pull himself.

“It doesn’t matter if the Empire catches you out here or not.” Cham Syndulla’s face was stormy, his eyes bright and hard. “There’s work to be done, Hera. You have no time to dawdle outside, stargazing. Your work is here—“ he jabbed his hand backwards towards the house “—not up there.”

The urge to argue with that point grew stronger every day, but Hera quashed that recalcitrant voice for now. She had no idea what she’d say, and it just didn’t… didn’t feel quite ripe yet. It was still forming in her mind. “Father, it’s past dark. Only the people standing watch still have work tonight. What am I _supposed_ to be doing?”

“I asked you to—“

“Go through Mother’s things,” Hera cut him off flatly. She found herself fighting to keep from clenching her hands into fists. “I did that this morning, with Numa and Chopper. And not with you,” she added pointedly. Was he really lecturing her on work she had or hadn’t done? Was he really doing that, when he wasn’t paying enough attention to keep track of the things she _had_ done?

Cham had the grace to look abashed, though Hera could see it only in his lekku, which stiffened and drew slightly closer to his back; the expression on his face didn’t so much as flicker. “We all have our duties,” and his voice was a touch softer, but that just made it _worse_. “Mine demanded that I be elsewhere”

“So you just left it to me?” Something hard and hot sprouted in her chest, wrapping around her heart like a choking vine. “You just left _that_ for me to do by _myself_?”

He looked away. “There was other work to be done. And your hands have been quite idle of late.”

The thing that had sprouted in Hera’s chest migrated from her chest to her disbelieving mind, pressing down hard on anger. Suddenly, Hera didn’t care that the thoughts that had been running through her head about work and where she could do the most good were half-formed at best. “So why don’t you give me work to do instead of just complaining that I haven’t been working?” That… didn’t quite sound right, didn’t quite sound like the way the vocalizations of her half-formed desires should sound, but Hera wasn’t going to let that stop her. Hera caught her father’s eye, effectively preventing him from looking away from her again. “I _want_ to help more than I have, but you won’t let me. I could help more if I wasn’t stuck in this house; I know I could.”

Cham winced, something too-bright flashing in his eyes. “Hera—“

“Give me something to do and I’ll do it,” Hera said firmly. She tilted her chin upwards. “But don’t complain when you find my hands empty. No one else here is willing to give me work; they don’t think it’s their place. You _know_ that, Father.”

He regarded her in somewhat stunned silence for what felt like entirely too long. What had he been expecting? Hera wondered in frustration. How had he expected this conversation to go? Did he think that the truth would give way to his views of the world and of her? He should have been there with her this morning. That thought kept returning to the forefront of Hera’s mind, but she knew it wasn’t her biggest concern. (It kept coming back anyways.) If he thought she’d been sitting idle because she wanted to…

If he thought that, he clearly hadn’t been paying any attention to her for a long longer than just the past two weeks.

Cham brought his fingertips to his forehead and sighed heavily, his shoulders sagging. In spite of her anger, the gesture made Hera’s heart sink. It made him look so _old_ , the ever-deepening lines on his face thrown into sharp relief. Hera could remember a time when her father had still looked like the young man he (still) was, but over the past few years he had aged so rapidly, as one war mutated into another, into another. At this rate, in a few years’ time he might look old enough to be her grandfather rather than her father, and where was that likely to end, anyhow?

“Alright,” he said wearily. When Cham slid his hand between her shoulder blades and directed her back towards the interior of the house, Hera let him; he’d conceded the point to her, and that was enough. “I suspect—“ he smiled wryly down at her, half-hearted though that twist of his mouth might have been “—that if I ask you to stay here, you might just sneak out. I’d sooner avoid that. And I think you are old enough now to begin taking a more active role in our work.”

Pride flared up inside of her, but Hera only nodded.

“I’ve received reports that the Empire is in the process of setting up a base camp around five kilometers to the west, in the Guanting Pass.” His face hardened. “They’re close enough that we now run a greater risk of exposure. I would sooner know just how great a risk they pose before coming to a decision.”

“What do you want me to do?” Hera asked, barely managing to swallow down enough on her enthusiasm to sound properly serious. Her earlier anger was not forgotten, but it was shelved for now. Hera could shelve a lot of things when there was work to be done.

“This is a reconnaissance mission,” Cham said firstly, “not a raid. Do _not_ engage the enemy. You’ll have a blaster with you, but I don’t want you shooting anyone unless you’re caught out. I want you to find out just how many stormtroopers are stationed at the camp, and what sort of defenses the camp has. I want you to find out how many transports and speeders they have; if they have any shuttles or TIE fighters, take a count of them as well.”

Hera frowned. “You don’t want me to get closer? I could try and get a closer look at their inventory or their armory.”

But Cham shook his head swiftly, his lekku stiffening and pulling away from his back. “No,” and his voice carried just a little too much force, enough that Hera tensed and peered up at him out of narrowed eyes. “All I wish to know if the camp is enough of a threat to us that it would be better to move our own base elsewhere.”

 _I can do it_ danced on the tip of Hera’s tongue, begging to be heard, but she gave it no voice. What was overreaching going to accomplish here? There was every chance her father would change his mind and not let her go on the mission at all. So she swallowed her objections whole and, ignoring the way she could still hear them scream, nodded. “Is there anything else?”

“You’ll leave tomorrow night, just after sundown; the tunnels open at a point in the Guanting Pass close to where the camp is supposed to be located. Take your droid with you.” A note of remote displeasure entered into his voice. “It’s well past time for it to begin pulling its weight.”

“Chopper has already been helpful here,” Hera retorted, her jaw set. “He fixed the sensor beacons on the perimeter, remember?”

Cham was no more interested in reconsidering his opinion of Chopper today than he was any other day, though. He raised a hand to silence her. “I am not interested in having this conversation with you _again_ , Daughter. Take Numa with you when you go, as well. Two pairs of eyes will serve the mission better than one.”

 _Three_ , Hera thought, but nodded.

He left her, walking at a decent clip towards the nearest staircase. Up towards the control room again, no doubt, possibly to go the whole night without sleeping, again. That was his own business, though, and Hera had business of her own.

On reflex, she looked behind her, and scarcely knew why she was surprised when she realized that Numa and Chopper hadn’t followed her. They had no reason to, especially not Numa, who would likely have preferred to avoid becoming a party to the conversation. Hera bowed her head and sighed heavily.

The courtyard where she had left them was empty; there was only the fountain catching the moonlight, lovely even if it was broken, the ghost of babbling water greeting her ears. Her hand skated over the cracked plaster on the rim of the fountain basin, with Hera wondering all the while what it must have been like when the house’s original inhabitants still lived here. What must this whole house have been like when it still enjoyed its former glory?

_It will again one day. We’ll drive the Empire from Ryloth, and we can all live the way we used to._

Whatever ‘used to’ had been like, anyways.

Hera went back inside the house, preparing for what might potentially be a long search to track them both down. Wherever Numa had gone off to, she really doubted Chopper had gone following after her. She was all down in lightless corridors again, but this time at least had a purpose while she walked there.

As Hera searched, a soft, snuffling noise reached her ears.

Hera paused outside the doorway into the room where the children (including her, though she had wound up sleeping in her parents’ bed whenever she was sick) slept and kept what few possessions they had. The room was usually empty at this time of night; you were more likely to find the other children trying to sneak into the kitchen for a snack, or playing games in the dark hallways, those with better night vision eagerly pressing home their advantage over the ones with night-weak eyes. When she passed by this door in the evening and the early hours of the night, she often heard nothing.

Tonight, though, there was someone sitting crying in the dark.

Hera ventured into the room, her eyes slowly adjusting to the greater degree of darkness here. There was Numa, sitting huddled over a wooden box that sat open beside her bed, and Chopper sitting beside her. “Numa?” she asked tentatively, taking another step into the room.

Numa didn’t answer, but the closer Hera came to her, the more obvious it became that she was the one who was crying. The room was empty but for the three of them, and as Hera drew closer, she could see Numa’s shoulders shaking, her lekku trembling. A harsh, miserable sob tore from her mouth, and Hera flinched, pausing. This was… Whatever she had stumbled upon, was it even something that it was right for her to see? In Hera’s experience, when someone slipped into a dark room to cry, they went off to be alone because they didn’t want a witness to their tears or whatever emotions accompanied them. It was something too private, too personal to be shared, or at least that had been Hera’s experience. If Chopper was here, that was because Chopper didn’t care about such things, not because Numa had invited him.

But she was here now, and she couldn’t so much as form an image in her mind of walking away.

“Numa,” she said softly, picking her way across the beds and toys lying out on the floor to kneel at Numa’s side. Hera pressed her hand to the top of Chopper’s head, but he didn’t respond. If not for the fact that she could feel a faint vibration, she would have thought he’d turned himself off.

Bloodshot purple eyes shot up at the sound of Hera’s voice, a taut, bewildered look twisting Numa’s face as she realized that Hera had come to her. “Hera…” Her voice was raw with weeping, the syllables slipping slowly from her mouth. “I…”

Hera squeezed Numa’s shoulder. For a moment, Numa’s face was a little like a mirror, and Hera had to look away, afraid to see herself there, knowing what she would find. When she trusted herself not to fall apart at the sight of her own emotions reflected in Numa’s face, she looked back to the other girl and asked softly, “Numa? What’s wrong?”

Numa gestured helplessly at the box that sat open before her, her lekku attempting some expression that it was impossible to make out. “I…” She sucked in a deep breath and swallowed hard, but her voice still wobbled dangerously as she said, “We were talking, and I had gotten to thinking… I… I’ve kept this for years. I carried it with me when we left the Tann Province to come here; it…” She tried for a smile, achieved only one of the most hideous grimaces Hera had ever seen. “…It weights a ton, you know; I thought I was going to break my spine carrying it on my back.”

With tentative curiosity, Hera tore her gaze away from Numa’s face and looked at the box in question. The moment she saw what lied in the box, understanding sank like a stone in her stomach.

Hera had never spoken to a clone trooper, but she had seen them from a distance, and even if she hadn’t, there were still holos and newsfeeds to look at; she recognized the armor when she saw it. The armor was old and battered, but the armor of a clone trooper had been built to last, and was far sturdier than any stormtrooper’s; Hera would wager it protected the wearer much better than the flimsy plastoid the Empire’s ‘finest’ wore while on-duty.

Then she spotted the face painted on the side of the helmet, and understanding grew claws and raked on her stomach ‘til it ached.

“Numa… I’m sorry, Numa.” She hadn’t found any pictures of herself when she went through her mother’s belongings this morning. Hera didn’t realize until she took another look at Numa’s face how grateful she was for that; if Numa was breaking down over this, she wasn’t at all certain she could have maintained her composure. “Were you very close?”

“N-no.” Numa took several sharp, shallow breaths, reaching up to furiously scrub the tears from her face. “Well… It depends. We didn’t know each other for very long.” A tremulous smile quivered on her lips. “We couldn’t understand anything the other said. But…” She rapped her knuckles against the breastplate in the box. “…When I knew them, they were all I really had.” Her voice cracked open on the last syllable, any attempt at composure dissolving into muffled tears.

Hera wrapped her arms around Numa’s back, her heart twisting itself into knots. “I’m sorry.” It was all she really knew to say.

“I feel,” Numa choked out, in huge, heaving breaths like she was trying to force down nausea, “I feel like… like I’m not connected to anything. Like I don’t have any connection to anything.” She slid her arms around Hera’s back, tight against her ribcage. “I feel like I’m not rooted down to anything,” she confessed, “like I could just… just float away into the sky, and there’s be nothing to stop me, and nobody who’d care or remember me!”

 _I’d care_ , but it didn’t feel like the right time to say it. It felt not like a reassurance, but an interruption.

“I just…” Another heaving gasp, so hard that Hera felt Numa’s whole body shake. “…I feel as though there’s no spark in me, no fire. I feel like I’m just wandering around doing what everyone tells me to, and wanting the things I want only because I should.”

But Hera had seen a spark in her. She had seen that flame burning, one tongue of flame to light up the dark, when Numa would talk to her about her work with Danae, when she joined the others in target practice, when she sat down at night and listened to Aola tell stories of the ancient world. There had been a time when Hera thought it was a match for the fire she could feel burning inside of herself, but she knew how that it wasn’t. She burned, but it was for something different, something that Hera could never touch.

Then again, no one seemed to burn inside quite the same way as Hera did.

“Do you know what that feels like?” Numa demanded, her raw voice pitching painfully high. “Do you know what—“ She swallowed so hard that Hera felt it rather than heard it, and fell silent, too overcome to speak.

Hera pulled Numa closer to her, a deep frown creasing her face. “I think I do,” she said slowly. Her eyes strayed to Chopper. Hera wished, for the first time, that he would say something to break the mood, heavy as a lead blanket, that had drifted down to try and smother them. Normally, the interruption would have been an embarrassment, but she would have welcomed it here. “I think I’ve felt like that.”

What was keeping Hera here wasn’t her roots—at least, she didn’t think they were roots, not anymore. They bit into her skin, unyielding and cold, forged by everything that still kept her here. Hera could scarcely put into words how limited she felt, except that it was a little like those poor slaves in Lessu, who were forced to bind their lekku together to appease their Imperial masters. She had not the words; there was a whole vocabulary that was locked away from her, as if someone had cut off her lekku or stitched her mouth shut, and then chopped her fingers off so that she couldn’t even use Basic Sign Language to express herself.

She was sure there was something more that she could say about it, but she had yet to find the words. All she had was the nagging fear that when the day came, her chains would break far too easily.

“I wouldn’t let you float away,” she said instead, in place of all the half-formed thoughts that plagued her mind during the long watches of the night.

Numa let out a choked, hiccupping laugh. “I wouldn’t, either. I suppose we’ll have to be each other’s anchors.”

They sat in silence for a long time, clinging to one another. Hera would have been content to stay in silence like this forever, but she had greater obligations than just to herself. “Numa, I should tell you. We have a mission tomorrow night.”

-0-0-0-

Hera had never liked the tunnels. They were, according to her father, a vestige of a time when warfare between the clans had been commonplace. What had served as an evacuation route and a means by which to ambush enemies in the past served the same purpose in the present. What Hera had a difficult time understanding was how a successful ambush could ever be carried out using these tunnels. Their ceilings were low, so low that Hera could reach out and brush the ceiling with her fingertips, all without having to do so much as stand on tiptoe. They were narrow enough that Hera didn’t think that any more than three grown Twi’leks could have walked shoulder-to-shoulder, and even then, it would have been a tight fit. And there were no markers to give you a good idea of just where the path was taking you; Hera only knew where she was leading Numa and Chopper because her father had given her a small holomap before they set out.

The first few nights they had stayed at the estate in the mountains, after she had first learned of these tunnels’ existence, Hera’s sleep had been haunted by nightmares. She dreamed of being shut up in the tunnels, alone in the dark with no way out. At first, the tunnels were tall enough for her to stand upright, but the further she walked, the lower the ceilings became, the narrower the walls became, until she was crawling on her knees, her hands scrabbling to find purchase in damp, loose soil that shifted under her like sand.

Suddenly, the ground gave way beneath her and she was tumbling down, down, down, until she landed with the kind of painless thud that only a dream could furnish on wet stone. She could hear water dripping, but it was utterly dark before her, and she was blind as a worm, groping on stone to try to find a wall she could climb. Her hands never found the wall. The silent dark swallowed her voice so that there wasn’t even an echo left behind. There was nothing.

Back in the present, Hera tripped over a tree root and barely managed to keep her footing. “Hell is real, and I’m walking through it,” she grumbled.

Chopper muttered agreement (he’d had to be righted after falling over four times now), but Hera could practically _feel_ Numa roll her eyes behind her. “How much further until we reach the door?”

“According to the map, about point eight kilometers. It can’t come soon enough for me,” Hera admitted, though she knew she’d already made her position clear. “These tunnels are awful.”

“There isn’t much room to move around in,” Numa agreed.

That wasn’t quite why, but Hera kept her mouth shut. There would be time enough for that later.

Finally, mercifully, they reached the door, a small hatch that opened up onto a cave in the mountains. Hera grabbed Numa’s hands, now caked with dirt, to help her out; both jumped back as Chopper propelled himself out with his rocket boosters.

“You know, you could have waited for us to get out of the way,” Hera pointed out, eyebrow raised.

Chopper waved his manipulator arms dismissively. _‘You two were taking too long. Organic beings might like to cower underground, but I was meant to conquer, not cower!’_

Despite herself, Hera cracked a smile. “Keep it up with that attitude. We’re gonna need it.”

“What did the droid just say?” Numa asked, staring dubiously down at Chopper.

“Oh, just Chopper-talk; he’s looking forward to the mission.” Hera smiled at Numa, her previous irritation with the tunnels giving way to a giddy, breathless excitement that sang to the tune of _My first mission_. “Do you remember what you need to do?”

Numa nodded resolutely. She seemed to have left last night behind her, almost as though it had never happened, though Hera had caught (and been careful not to comment on) her eyes misting a little this morning. They were alike in this way; the mission was the most important thing, more important than any personal issue. Hera was… glad, that they were of one mind on this.

(Glad, and ignored the fact that she could hardly know that the mission was the most important thing to her when this was her _first_ mission.)

They stepped out of the cave and into fortunately cloudy night; the moons combined would have left them too exposed, made it easy for an Imperial to spot them from afar. The steep drop into the valley below was carpeted with tall, scraggly bushes and short, scraggly trees, all clothed with spiny leaves that jabbed at Hera’s arms and legs as she made the descent.

The Imperial camp was immediately visible as they carefully navigated their path down the side of the mountain. If the Resistance feared being spotted at night enough to cut out most of the lights the moment the sun set, the Empire clearly didn’t share concerns. The camp shone like a beacon in the dark, so bright that Hera had to avoid looking at it as much as she could, as to avoid night-blindness—she didn’t relish the thought of her first mission being cut short by her falling and breaking her neck.

“They’re so brazen,” Numa hissed somewhere behind her. “They’ve no fear of anything, have they?”

Hera sighed. She didn’t dare look back at Numa; that would probably be immediately followed by a tumble down the mountainside. “One day, we’ll teach them better,” she said. “One day, we’ll teach them they can’t crush us under their feet without consequences.”

For now, they had neither enough manpower nor enough armaments. _There’s always more of them, and never enough of us. If there had been less of them, perhaps Mother—_

No. No, she couldn’t think about that right now.

 _‘We could teach them today if you’d let me blow the place up,’_ Chopper suggested with undisguised hope.

Hera ignored him, and kept on.

The camp was about two kilometers away from the access point in the cave, spreading from one side of the valley to the other, so that it would have been impossible to pass by the camp without climbing again. As the three neared the camp, they split up, Hera and Chopper heading west while Numa headed east, each of them climbing again. At least the bushes and trees that the Empire hadn’t bothered to clear would provide them with some cover, though if Chopper went tumbling down the mountainside, their cover would be broken anyways.

It was Numa’s job to determine what kind of defenses the camp had. Part of her training had been to identify different kinds of anti-aircraft and speeder weapons, as well as cannons, deactivators, and long-range disruptors. Hera could identify different kinds of blasters, but that was about it; her talents were better spent counting stormtroopers and speeders and TIEs.

As she went about her work, Hera’s eyes occasionally strayed to the mountainside opposite her own. No matter how she looked, she couldn’t make out Numa in the dark, not so much as a shadow darting among the bushes. It was a good thing, really; if Numa was hiding herself well enough that Hera couldn’t catch sight of her, the Imperials probably wouldn’t spot her, either. Still, her stomach churned a little. She wished there had been someone else out here with them; it wasn’t good for Numa to be alone on her side.

The work was slow. Though the tall lamps set up veritably flooded the camp with light, there were enough buildings, plastoid sheds that, from the way some of them tilted, looked to have been constructed in a hurry, that it was hard to guess how many men were stationed at the base. Hera had counted twenty-two stormtroopers so far. If she had to guess, there was room at the base for a lot more than that.

 _So they probably have more people than we do._ Hera didn’t see any TIEs nor shuttles, and none of the buildings looked large enough to house them. A small blessing, though Hera supposed they could have been on patrol or just hadn’t arrived yet. She didn’t see any speeders, either, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything; any one of the sheds could have served as a garage. _They might have more men, they might have better equipment, but we’re smarter than them. We know Ryloth better, know her geography and history better._

The Empire didn’t care anything for Ryloth asides from what it could take from Ryloth to feed itself. Hera would see it be their downfall one day.

She watched the activity below, trying to catch a glimpse of the interiors of the buildings the stormtroopers, uniformed officers, and the occasional Twi’lek (and if it came down to it, the fact that Hera didn’t know if they were collaborators or conscripts would be the only thing that kept her from setting detonators in key locations and pushing the trigger) walked in and out of. They were mostly dark; the only things Hera could really make out were a barracks and what she thought was a mess hall. No way to tell which building, if any, was a garage.

Then again, maybe the speeders just hadn’t been sent in yet. IT really did look like the camp was still being set up; a lot of the stormtroopers and Twi’leks were carrying boxes back and forth between buildings, and for a camp this big, it seemed just a little… empty.

Hera’s hand curled around the handle of the blaster holstered at her hip. She doubted her father would have approved, but there really was only one way to find out. “Chopper, have you been running those scans like I asked you to?”

 _‘The bucketheads have some sort of jammer set up,’_ Chopper groused. ‘ _Damn Imps; my receptors are getting staticky. It’s the kind of jammer meant to block long-range comm; works on long-range scans, too.’_

That… was a little frustrating. But it also served Hera’s purposes perfectly. “So what you’re saying is we need to get in closer.”

 _‘If you want me getting anything more useful than a screen full of static, yeah, we’ve gotta move a_ lot _closer.’_

Hera bit back a giddy grin. “Then let’s get closer. It’s not going to be dark out forever.”

As much as the idea of getting in closer appealed to Hera, it wasn’t as though doing so was actually anything approaching easy. There was the matter of the descent. Hera had to find a safe path that let her crouch down behind the trees and bushes rather than being too exposed, and without falling; Chopper was having an even harder time, and wound up taking an extremely circuitous route to get to where Hera had set up watch. There was also finding appropriate cover once she did find a good spot to watch from. But once she did…

Hera had never thought she would be so happy for Imperial arrogance as she was now, but there were no perimeter sensors, no guards watching the pass for signs of movement, and the stormtroopers milling about the camp were completely uninterested in anything going on outside the cam’s borders. As galling as Imperial arrogance was, it served her well tonight.

“Are we close enough?” Hera hissed to Chopper, ducking lower down as two stormtroopers walked by barely ten feet away.

‘ _Hang on, hang on.’_ Chopper focused his photoreceptor on the camp. ‘ _Yeah, I can scan again. There’s still some interference; I’d probably have to be in the camp for it to go away completely.’_

Hera sighed, briefly pressing her head against the ground. “We’ll have to live with ‘some interference,’ Chop. We haven't got a better option.” Even as eager as she was to move in closer, Hera was under no illusions as to the wisdom of heading into the camp itself.

 _‘We do have a better option, Hera._ ’ That… sweet note in Chopper’s voice was one Hera had learned to recognize over the past several years. Recognize, and be suspicious of.

“And what option is that?” she asked cautiously.

Still sounding as saccharine as meiloorun juice, Chopper explained, _‘I could go down there and set detonators in every building. These idiots never look at droids; they wouldn’t watch what I was doing. They don’t know to fear me as they should, and we can use that to our advantage. I set the detonators, and then once we got very far from the camp, I could trigger the detonators and blow the camp sky-high. Doesn’t that sound nice, Hera?’_

“No,” she said flatly, “it doesn’t.” Never mind that Hera had entertained thoughts of doing the same thing; that was supposed to be a _last resort_ , not the first move you made on the dejarik board. “This is a _reconnaissance_ mission, remember?”

 _‘They’re Imps. They’re here. They’ve got no plans of leaving. What else do you need to know?’_ Chopper explained, in a too-patient tone like he was explaining something very simple to someone who also happened to be very simple. ‘ _We’ve got no reason_ not _to blow this place sky-high_.’

“You know, Father thinks you’re a waste of time.”

_‘Your father’s an idiot.’_

Ignoring that (to be fair, Cham was a bit of an idiot where Chopper was concerned), Hera prodded his chassis and told him, “And you disobeying orders and doing something that brings the Empire out in force is not going to convince him that you’re _not_ a waste of time.”

‘ _Hera, please,’_ Chopper begged.

“No. We’re not blowing up the camp.” Though Hera longed for the day when her father didn’t snipe about Chopper at every opportunity, she really hoped he didn’t ever think it a good idea to send Chopper on a mission without her present. Asides from the fact that she was the only one in the cell who could really understand what Chopper was saying, she didn’t think Chopper would actually listen to anyone else who told him he wasn’t allowed to blow anything up. “Now get back to scanning.”

 _‘Killjoy,’_ Chopper groused, but he did as he was told. ‘ _See if I remember you when I’m running this place.’_

Hera went back to watching the doorways to the buildings closest to her, straining her eyes for any sign that the doors to one of the sheds might open, straining her ears for any snatch of conversation she might catch. She was decently fluent in Basic, now; she’d probably understand anything the stormtroopers talked about amongst themselves.

More than once, Hera caught her gaze drifting upwards. She couldn’t see the stars here; the fluorescent lights that shone down on the camp were too bright. _They must be perpetually night-blind_ , Hera mused. If she had a better idea of how stormtrooper helmets worked, she could probably figure out how well their night-vision settings worked (If they even had such a thing; if the Empire went for so cheap and flimsy a material as plastoid to make the armor, how likely was it that their helmets were outfitted with advanced, reliable technology?). This would have to do for now.

“Why does the commander have so much junk?” Hera eventually heard one of them grumble, as he and his fellow hauled a large chair across an open space in the camp. “Who needs this much furniture?”

“Least it’s not as heavy as the table,” the other countered. “Why does he want all of this, anyways? Plasteel’s less likely to break; doesn’t rot, either.”

“I’ve heard this stuff doesn’t rot. It’s some pine tree from Na—“ the first stormtrooper paused, fishing for the word he was looking for “—kal, or wherever. The wood petrifies when it dies.”

The sound of the word ‘petrifies’ was like someone ringing a claxon in Hera’s mind. She perked her head up, squinting against the harsh light to get a better look at what was going on.

The chair was a bright, bright red.

They were at the edge of the camp, in a fairly isolated area. Hera didn’t know for certain if the buildings closest to them were occupied or not; she’d heard no sound emanate from within, but if the stormtroopers inside were sleeping, then silence didn’t necessarily mean anything. The buildings were large enough to provide effective cover from the other parts of the camp; of the personnel wandering around outside, none were within sight.

She could do it. Judging by how lousy a shot every single stormtrooper she’d ever encountered tended to be, she could do it easily.

“Wait here,” she whispered to Chopper. “I’ll be right back.”

 _‘What do you mean, ‘wait here?!’_ Chopper hissed. _‘What are you doing?’_

“Just wait here,” Hera told him, and began to creep closer to the camp.

No matter how heavy that chair might have been, it was still a chair, one sized for a human man who couldn’t have been outstandingly huge. It was just Hera’s luck she’d gotten the two stormtroopers who were too weak to easily carry a chair.

The stun setting on the blaster… The stun setting was quieter than the kill setting. Maybe if she got them from behind…

The first one went down easily, the chair falling on top of them. The second whipped around, but before they could raise their blaster pistol or sound an alarm, Hera dropped him with a stun bolt. He collapsed to the ground, his armor clattering far, far too loudly for Hera’s comfort. Oh, well. She just needed to grab the chair and get out of here.

‘ _Hera?!’_ Proving once again that he had no regard for orders, Chopper abandoned his hiding spot and wheeled over to where she stood. _‘What was that all about?!’_

“What?” Hera whispered, scanning the camp for any sign that the others had heard her. “You’re telling _me_ off for doing something reckless?”

Chopper waved his manipulator arms defensively. _‘Hey, I’m all for fucking with bucketheads, but this… is weird. For you.’_

“I’ll explain later. Just watch my back.”

The chair _was_ heavy; she’d give the stormtroopers that. Hera hefted it up, trying to find a way to carry it that would leave a hand free for her blaster. It was awkward, and she couldn’t move very quickly that way, but it would do. It would have to do. She’d finally found something she could _do_ about everything that was going on, and—

“Hey, you! Put your hands up!”

Apparently the stun bolts weren’t quite quiet enough to completely avoid drawing attention.

Two more stormtroopers had come round the side of one of the nearby buildings. Another came stumbling out of one of the buildings. Hera fired at all of them, but her aim was off thanks to the weight of the chair. She got one and missed the other two. They came closer, firing back, but their aim wasn’t any better than hers, and she dropped the other two eventually.

By now, the camp wasn’t quiet anymore. She could hear voices raised in orders and demands, could hear the thunder of footsteps on the hard-packed ground. ‘ _Hera, unless you want to blow this place sky-high after all, we really need to go_ ,’ Chopper said, tugging insistently on her pant leg.

Hera sucked in a deep, uneven breath, her eyes darting all around. Could she… Could she get out of here in time? There _were_ other people inside the buildings after all. How many? How many were there here? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred? Her heart hammered in her chest, beating a tattoo that sang her own impulsiveness back to her.

Running footsteps came pounding from the opposite side of the camp. Hera whirled around, blaster at the ready, but it was Numa, who came to an abrupt halt before her, gasping for breath. “Hera,” she nearly wheezed. “I saw… I saw blaster fire. Are you…” She looked at Hera. _Really_ looked at Hera. Her face contorted in undisguised disbelief. “Hera, what are you _doing_?!”

Hera stared helplessly at her. “I…” Words which under other circumstances would have so easily risen to her lips tangled themselves into a knot in her mouth. “I…”

She was spared from having to reply by the arrival of more stormtroopers one the scene. Numa shot the leader before they could get a chance to bark out their warning—and she, Hera noticed dimly, was _not_ using the stun setting. The other stormtroopers apparently felt that looking after their fellow soldiers was more important than going after two rebels, because they dropped to their knees beside their fallen leader, trying to help them up.

“Hera, we need to go,” Numa hissed to her, eyeing the three stormtroopers warily. “Whatever you’re trying to do, stop it and follow me.”

They started to make their way back into the wilderness. Hera huffed and puffed as she tried to run with the chair in her grasp—Numa looked back at her and snapped, “Hera, leave the chair!”, but Hera kept a tight grip on it, nonetheless.

A few—Hera couldn’t tell how many, not exactly—stormtroopers pursued them, lighting up the night with blaster fire. Numa offered a spray of fire in return. The first time she hit one of them, they scattered, running pell-mell for the relative safety of their camp.

But that was not the end of it.

“Stop right there, you little thieves!”

A human man in the drab uniform of an Imperial officer jumped out at them, brandishing a shiny black blaster pistol. Hera and Numa both stopped dead in their tracks. Hera clutched the chair in both hands, white-knuckled, while Numa kept her blaster trained on the officer. But though her face as resolute, her ragged breathing filled Hera’s ears, and the sour smell of sweat quickly reached her nose.

The officer sneered down at them, curling her lip to reveal slightly yellowed teeth. “Is this the best you savages can manage?” he mocked them, his reedy Core accent grating on Hera’s ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. “A pair of children sent to steal my belongings?”

Hera wondered desperately how much mileage she and Numa could get out of pretending not to understand Basic. It had worked for her before, one time when she was on an errand in Rhovari and had accidentally bumped into a particularly raw officer. This man was clearly not so inexperienced as that one had been, but maybe…

Numa spoke, and that put a stopper on any hope of Hera’s being able to talk her way out of the situation. “Whatever here you think belongs to you,” she nearly snarled, her mouth twisting hideously, in heavily-accented Basic that was nevertheless immediately recognizable as Basic, “it does not. You had to steal it from us to get it.”

His face flushed a blotchy shade of maroon. “Why, you—Down on your knees, both of you!” he barked, nostrils flaring out.

Hera’s knees locked; they wouldn’t have moved even if she wanted them to. Beside her, Numa stood just as straight, her blaster still trained right on the officer’s face. Her breathing had evened out, and though her purple eyes burned with a wild light, she seemed calmer now, steadier.

Herself, Hera’s breath was caught fast in her throat.

The standoff went on, the three of them hardly daring to move. Numa eyed the officer like a hunter would eye a wounded gutkurr, contemplating whether or not she should move in for the kill. For all his bravado, the officer seemed undecided as to the wisdom of picking a fight with those two girls; he repeated his order in a high voice that cracked noticeably, but didn’t open fire when met with silent disobedience.

Hera weighed her options. Throwing the chair at him might serve as enough of a distraction to let him get away; once they were _really_ back in the brush, they could lose the officer easily. But would she be able to get the chair back from him? Would she be able to make a run for it with this thing in her grasp, when she had an Imperial officer hot on her heels, and one perfectly capable of calling for reinforcements as well?

There was no question of the merits of telling him who she was and hoping for more lenient treatment. The Empire didn’t care one whit about the status of the Syndulla; Hera had already seen the slave ships come for far too many of her clan already, with the Empire actively encouraging the practice. And if she could make the officer believe that she was the daughter of the Free Ryloth movement’s leader, he was just as likely to kill her as take her hostage.

_And he’d just kill Numa and Chopper, anyways._

_…Chopper._

_Where’s Chopper?_

As if in answer to her unspoken question, the officer let out a piercing shriek as jolts of electricity shot up his body. He twisted and screamed, trying desperately to get away, but at this point, it was well beyond his brain’s capacity to send the appropriate signal to his legs. Eventually, Chopper showed a smidgen of mercy (which was about as much mercy as he ever showed anyone, so really, the officer should have been grateful) and deactivated his electro-shock prod.

Hera watched with bated breath as the officer’s now-huge, unfocused eyes settled non her. He opened his mouth. Clearly, he meant to say something he thought profound, be it an insult or a warning. Something that would take a little of the sting out of his defeat.

“Wabbah,” he said, and collapsed in a heap.

Hera and Numa stared at his prone form, Hera barely daring to believe that he was unconscious (Or dead, if the dose of the shock had been high enough). She was snapped back to herself only by a very familiar vocalization: the unmistakable sound of Chopper grumbling.

 _‘You’re welcome!’_ he said, trying to mime the action of an organic putting their hands on their hips—which failed miserably, since Chopper didn’t have any hips.

Hera set the chair down carefully on the ground to go over and press her hand to the top of Chopper’s head. “Chop, am I glad to see you! Good job!”

Chopper shook her off and rolled a-ways closer to the camp. Before Hera could stop him, he propelled something roughly the size of Hera’s fist back towards the camp. That something, upon landing atop the nearest building, exploded in a cloud of iridescent smoke, causing the building to collapse in a fiery heap. Chopper cackled uproariously, his manipulator arms stretched towards the sky and his head spinning round and round.

“ _Chopper_!” Hera shrieked, horrified. “That’s going to draw them right to us!”

 _‘You get to be stupid, I get to be stupid!’_ Chopper retorted. ‘ _Wooooo!_ ’

Numa’s hand clamped down painlessly on Hera’s shoulder. “Alright, now we _really_ need to go, Hera!” she insisted, her voice high with panic. “At this rate, they’re going to call for reinforcements from another installment. We can’t stay here!”

Hera nodded mutely. She reached for the chair, but Numa’s hand moved to her elbow.

“Hera, _leave it_!” she pleaded. Her eyes darted over Hera’s face, bright with dread at the idea of having to fight a battalion of fresh, possibly better-trained stormtroopers. “It’s just a chair; _leave it here!_ ”

A siren started going off in the camp, letting out a shrill, piercing wail that cut down to Hera’s bones. Her eyes darted from Numa’s face to the camp; several stormtroopers had gathered around the burning building, trying desperately to put the fire out, and two officers were approaching the scene as well. Part of her wanted to try to run with the chair in hand anyways, the same part of her that couldn’t find it in herself to tell Numa why she had taken it in the first place. But the more sensible part of Hera was beginning to reassert itself, and it told her to make a run for it while she still could. It told her that there were still things she needed to do, and that she couldn’t accomplish anything if she was dead.

It made this all feel like a complete waste, but Hera left the chair behind her and ran.

The three of them took off in a mad dash back to the access point. Hera didn’t dare look behind her to see if they were being followed; she was deaf to everything besides the roaring of her blood in her ears, and wouldn’t have been capable of hearing stormtroopers chasing after them. Harsh, ragged breaths tore from her mouth, her heart beating like a hammer on her ribcage.

They scrabbled up the side of the mountain, in their haste uncaring of finding a “safe,” “easy” route; Chopper didn’t even bother trying to find a safe land-based path, instead rocketing up the mountain, a streak of blue flame tearing open the night. Hera’s hands tore and bled; the sensation of pain was more distant than the stars above, less important than making sure she didn’t step on an ant while she was outside. The only thing that mattered at all was getting to the cave and, stars help her, the tunnels before anyone could catch up with them.

They reached the tunnels and started running. If someone was going to throw a smoke bomb down the hole, if they’d discovered the tunnels at all, they had to keep moving, they had to keep running, had to reach the other end of the route before anyone could catch up, had to get as far away as possible from the other access point so they couldn’t be tracked back to their base. Hera ran blindly down the tunnels, barely even remembering she had a map, let alone taking it out and using it. She was just barely aware of Numa and Chopper hot on her heels behind her.

“Stop!” Numa cried. “Stop!”

Hera came to a halt so fast she nearly fell over. She whipped around and winced when Numa flipped on her flashlight. “Hera,” she wheezed, pressing a hand against the rough-hewn wall for support. “Hera, I don’t think they’re chasing us anymore. We can stop. I—“ She looked away, shamefaced, but pressed on, “I need to stop… for a few minutes.”

Hera heard for the first time Numa’s ragged breathing and winced. _I should have—_ but it hardly mattered now, did it? “Chop, will you keep a lookout for stormtroopers?”

‘ _Sure,’_ Chopper agreed, but she could easily pick out a rumble of discontent in his voice. ‘ _If the worst comes, we can always set detonators and collapse the tunnels with the stormtroopers still in here. Should be easy.’_

That… Oh, no, it wasn’t even worth addressing that. Hera turned her attention back to Numa. “Are you alright?” she asked, regarding Numa closely for any sign of blood or blaster burns. She caught sight of a little bit of blood on Numa’s hands, but that was probably from climbing so fast up the side of the mountain. _I should have brought bandages,_ Hera thought guiltily. _I should have brought bandages and salve. Anything could have happened to us._

Numa nodded, swallowing hard. “I’m not hurt. Do you still have the map?”

“Yes.” Hera patted her belt, only to groan as she realized something else was missing. “Damn it, I dropped my blaster.”

“That’s not so bad; there’s still plenty back at base.” Numa’s face hardened, her eyes glinting in the gloom. “Hera…”

“…Yes?” Hera couldn’t quite meet her gaze.

“What were you _thinking_?” Numa hissed, her voice wobbling. The flashlight bobbed up and down as she started to tremble uncontrollably. “We could have been killed! We could have been shot or beaten, or held hostage, or sold into slavery and forced to work as prostitutes in the Octagon!”

Hera flinched.

Numa drew a sharp, whistling breath. “All this over a _chair_ , Hera? What were you thinking?!”

“It was immortal pine,” Hera blurted out. She really didn’t know what else to say.

Numa blinked. In the deep shadows birthed by her flashlight, her face looked as carven wood. “What?”

“It… it was immortal pine,” Hera stammered, fiddling with her belt. “Immortal pine… that’s the wood you said had to be used to make a kalikori in Nabat, isn’t it? The wood yours was made of?”

Numa stared at her, stricken. Then, her legs wobbling and her shoulders sagging, she slid down and came to sit with her back pressed against the wall, nursing her head in one hand.

_I should have said something. I should have told her. If she’d known, she wouldn’t have told me to leave it behind._

But the past, even a single moment gone, was another universe, too far away for Hera to ever have any hope of reaching it.

After a moment’s hesitation, Hera sat down beside Numa on the cool earth, her shoulder pressed against Numa’s slighter one. Whether he was still checking for stormtroopers like she’d asked, Hera had no idea, but Chopper wheeled slowly over and stopped right in front of them, back turned, photoreceptor staring eastwards. Steadily, if slowly, Hera’s pulse evened out, her heart ceasing its wild hammering. She resisted the urge, however strong it might been, to drape a lek around Numa’s shoulders. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, not right now.

“Hera,” Numa mumbled, drawing her hand away from her face at last. She hadn’t been crying, Hera noted (with more than a small amount of shamed relief), but her face was etched with something sharp and desolate, too keen for Hera to give it a name without it cutting her open and burrowing inside the wound. “A kalikori isn’t… A new kalikori isn’t going to make me feel any better. It’s not going to help.”

Scarcely able to believe what she had just heard, Hera blinked rapidly, her shoulders stiffening. “That—what do you _mean_ , ‘it wouldn’t help’?” she forced out.

The silence that followed was absolutely damning—to Hera, anyways.

“Numa, the kalikori is your family _history_.” Her voice rose, uneven and battering on her teeth with each breath. “It’s your connection to the past! Of course it would help!”

“No, it wouldn’t!” Numa retorted, her eyes flashing.

“The past isn’t worthless, Numa!” Symbols and faces danced through Hera’s mind, warped and wavering and digging so far down as to root themselves in the base of her skull, like a creeping vine wrapping around a tree. “Your family history isn’t worthless! _They_ aren’t—“

“ _What_ history?!” Numa cut her off, nearly shouting. She ground her teeth, the clacking noise of tooth on tooth unnaturally loud in the tunnel. “My kalikori was destroyed years ago; my family are all dead! I would just be left with a piece of wood with only one prayer carved on it.” She sucked in a deep breath that came back out converted into something dangerously close to a sob. “Hera…” She wavered, her eyes overly bright; eventually, she swallowed so hard that Hera couldn’t help but wince. “…Hera, my future is dust.” She clutched a handful of dust in her hand, and let it filter out between her fingers, slowly, slowly, until her hand was empty again. “Dust and splinters. I don’t want a kalikori if all it’s going to do is remind me that I’m _alone_.”

Hera stared at her, huge-eyed, the fury that had so suddenly ignited within her burning out just as quickly, so that not even an ember was left behind. “…You’re not alone,” she said, very quietly, “and I… I am sorry, Numa.”

Numa’s face softened, though whether with forgiveness or simple grief was impossible to determine. “Thank you.”

Hera found Numa’s hand in the dark. Under layers of crusted dirt and blood and oily cixa extract, she could scarcely feel Numa’s skin, but she squeezed hard anyways. “And I _still_ won’t let you float away,” she murmured, only half-intending for Numa to hear. Intending not at all to let Numa know that she was less certain by the day if there was anything at all that would keep her herself from floating away when the day came that her not-roots would crumble.

“Thank you,” Numa murmured, a watery smile playing on her lips. And maybe she had forgiven her this time; Hera didn’t know. It didn’t matter much.

Though she had no love for the tunnels, Hera would have loved to stay there a bit longer, avoid having to go back to base and explain what had happened. But they were expected back in just a few short hours, them and their report. Hera heaved a sigh and got to her feet, Numa following after. “Come on, we have to get back,” Hera said reluctantly. “Mind, I have no idea what we’re going to tell my father about what happened.”

Numa raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think we have to tell him _everything_ that happened, Hera. Just…” She waved a hand. “…Basics.”

“Yes,” Hera agreed hastily. “Basics.”

 _‘I recorded everything,’_ Chopper added, apparently in the spirit of being as unhelpful as possible today.

“Then it’s a good thing that Father doesn’t understand a word you say, and that I’m the only one who knows how to fix half of what goes wrong with you,” Hera told him pointedly.

Chopper paused, apparently considering the point. _‘Huh. Well-played, Hera_ ,’ he said, not without some tone of frustration.

“I take it the droid was recording us,” Numa asked dryly.

Hera startled, _“When did you learn to understand him?”_ on the tip of her tongue, before remembering that the context would have given it away. “Yes, he did. But Chopper’s not going to tell on us.” She patted the top of his head and smiled. “He’s not like that.”

Chopper waved his manipulator arms. ‘ _Stop that!’_

A hoarse chuckle escaped Numa’s mouth. “I suppose I’ll just have to trust you.”

They started to head back, Hera holding the map up while the narrow beam of light from Numa’s flashlight illuminated the path ahead in the warren of tunnels. Somewhere up ahead, one of the access points must have been left at least partly open, for the wind moaned and rushed up to greet them. The gust of fresh air was the sweetest thing Hera had felt in her life.

A hand curled around hers.

She wrapped her fingers around the back of Numa’s hand, and wished for the stars.


End file.
